Monday, 26 November 2012

The Indian guides stepped
in, and two of the trek leaders flanked me front and back, taking my hand when
necessary (‘just hold it, please?’) and quickly learning to block my view
before I could register the next drop. By the time we made it to the bottom of
this valley, crossing a bridge with no sides to have lunch by the river, I was
shocked and mortified by what was happening to me. I felt too sick to swallow
any food, and there was still the other side of the mountain to climb to reach
where we’d camp for the night. I knew my body was empty, but we had to walk on.
One of the Indian guides, Manev, said to me, ‘For you this walk is about
companionship and helping hands. How very intuitive and wise: you see, I am not
the sort of person who asks for help, whatever I’m doing. I push myself hard,
finding it difficult to accept help from even my closest friends. And here I
was, being forced to literally hold hands with strangers.

The climb up was just as
bad, with the awareness that we were getting higher with every step so
obviously I would have so much further to fall as I tumbled and broke my neck.
I kept hearing a friend’s voice in my ear, ‘baby steps, just watch your feet
and don’t look over.’ It wasn’t always easy not to look, though, and eventually
I swore at it all. ‘Feck!’ The trek leader in front of me, Dave, said, “Thank
goodness for that. I was having trouble with an Irish person who didn’t swear.”
I laughed and told him I’d been doing my best to behave myself. From that point
on, I used expletives as ammunition to attack every next obstacle the mountain
threw at me: brooks over rocks and mud, flaky clay, the large tree that had
come down right across our path, hence acquiring my nickname for the week,
‘Madame Feck-feck.’

I arrived at camp in the
dark (and no, I wasn’t last). I wanted to hide in my tent and cry. But I
didn’t. After a coffee with a splash of brandy from my tent buddy, I wrapped up in my extra layers, donned my head torch, and
went for chai. Circling the edges of chatting groups, I would hear someone
refer to ‘that poor woman who was scared of heights’. I’d step forward, “That’d
be me.” And another, ‘that poor thing who was crying on the way down,’ “that’d
be me.” And that was when I started to make friends.

That night I could not
sleep, as in literally – my eyes, my body, my brain simply would not switch
off, despite me knowing that I was exhausted and needed it. Instead, the night
was filled with flash after flash of all the terrible moments that had made up
that fearful day, accompanied by wash after wash of adrenalin-flushed terror.
Definitely my long dark night of the soul. I had wanted this trip to India to
be in some way spiritually enlightening, but this sure as hell wasn’t what I’d
envisioned. So I lay there and made a plan – firstly that when I got home I
wouldn’t be so fiercely independent and would invite and be grateful for help
in my life, and secondly, that I would make it to the village on the next day’s
itinerary, then I’d head back along the road to Dharamsala. You see, I wasn’t
afraid of an adventure, I just had to get off this mountain.

Wednesday, 21 November 2012

(otherwise known as ‘getting around
the mountains on sugar, sweat and tears, and holding a lot of hands!’)

‘Did you see that man?’

‘What man?’

‘The one over there.’ I followed the
direction of the pointing finger. It was 6am and already there were people
everywhere. The porters crowded the back of the bus in their dirty red shirts
and un-white neckscarves. The luggage compartment was yanked open.

‘What’s he doing there?’ I ask.

‘Dunno,’ another voice responds.
‘He’s not one of them,’ she nods towards the porters. The porters, who step
over him, unlooking, to reach the bags.

I take a step closer to look. A
camera clicks beside me. ‘I have to have a picture of this, unbelievable.’ I
flinch. ‘Do you think he’s dead?’ asks camera woman.

In the dry dirt and dust of Delhi
train station, this man lies face down, his eyes shut, his body flat against
the hard, unwelcoming ground. His t-shirt is grubby to a point where I cannot imagine
the cause. His jeans are faded, ripped, plastered against the fleshless bones.
Naturally, he has no shoes.

One foot twitches.

‘Oh, good, he’s not dead then,’ as
she clicks once more.

I want to feel relieved. How can I
when his waking life is this? I wonder if anyone knows him. Anyone at all.

India is a tricky place to
visit. It is the first time I have been somewhere that I cannot say I
‘enjoyed’, because aspects of that culture and that world broke my heart.

For a start, it’s a long
way away: two planes, a seven hour train journey, and six hours on a minibus to
get to our destination in Northern India, Dharamsala, in the foothills of the
Himalayas. We arrived in the dark at 10pm, raced around to the restaurant that
kept our dinner for supper, then back to our hotel for 5 ½ hours’ sleep. The
previous two nights were lost to travel and time changes and unhealthy dozes in
various moving vehicles.

The next morning we stared
out of our window at the mountains rising before us and made sense of the fact
that we’d taken the elevator down last night to Floor One as Five was street
level. After breakfast, we were off in jeeps an hour further into the hills to
be deposited in a woody glade. The sun was shining. Snow was bright on the
distant peaks. Wow. We were kitted up, booted, and off. An hour later we
stopped for a breather, all in high spirits, guzzling our water as ordered and
trying to say hello to one another. Then we set off again, down the side of the
mountain. And I mean down the side of a mountain. Suddenly this was serious:
zig-zagging along what was way too steep to just go down, rough steps hewn into
the clay to give some foothold. The paths were narrow and the edges too close,
too severe: precipices.

Now I am not normally a
coward. I’m an independent career woman who has brought up an Autistic, deaf
young man by myself for many years. I have paraglided across the sea when I
cannot swim, I have done a ‘loop the loop’ in a small plane over the White
Cliffs of Dover, I’ve been to the top of the Eiffel Tower and the World Trade
Center, when it still stood. So I was not ready for what happened next: I
panicked! I looked at the size of those hills and the drop of those falls and I
was terrified. And terror is so unhelpful. Adrenalin pumps through your body,
wasting your energy reserves, and hyperventilation is totally ruining the
oxygen balance so you get wobbly and shaky – not what you need when you don’t
trust your feet on the ground anyway. Add to that the shock that it is
happening at all – to me – here in the Himalayas! I didn’t think it was the
most appropriate moment for a full-on nervous breakdown. And to top it off, I
was among strangers – what must they be thinking?